Attribution
Unknown

Hinges
Traces of three hinges on the left side.

Polychromy - Gilding
Faint traces of gilding and polychromy (bright red; see unpublished report by Guineau, 1995).

Reverse
In pencil: '122', and labelled: 'Douanes / exp...ons' [douanes / Expositions], 'A 37', 'Ivoires / Louvre / no. 122'.

Object Condition
Ivory cracked. Large crack visible at the back. Chip with notch along right side.
Hole for a clasp on the right edge, with 2 other holes on the same side, at top and bottom.
Restorations on left side (top and bottom).
Modern ring (silver) for hanging at top.

Comments
Of almost identical dimensions and considered as part of the same object as a similar leaf in the British Museum (1861,0416.2 (Dalton 246)). These panels did not however form a diptych, as the hinges do not match, so they were certainly part of a triptych or polyptych).

Provenance
Made for John Grandisson, Bishop of Exeter (b. 1327, d. 1369), evidence for this is given by his partly-effaced coat of arms (before 1358), featuring on both the Louvre panel and the British Museum panel (on the Louvre panel, a cross has been engraved over it); collection of Alexandre-Charles Sauvageot, Paris (no. 226), having acquired the object in 1836, he had it restored (according to no. 1547 in the written manuscript of his collection, by Jannic Durand); gift of A.-C. Sauvageot to the Musée du Louvre, 1856.

Bibliography
A. Sauzay, Musée impérial du Louvre. Catalogue du musée Sauvageot (Paris, 1861), no. 226.
A. Sauzay, Musée de la Renaissance [Musée du Louvre]. Notice des ivoires (Paris, 1863), no. 37.
J. O. Westwood, Fictile Ivories in the South Kensington Museum (London, 1876), no. 447-448 ('55.36, 37).
E. Molinier, Catalogue des ivoires. Musée national du Louvre (Paris, 1896), no. 122, engraving.
R. Koechlin, Les Ivoires gothiques français (Paris, 1924), I, p. 159; II, no. 272; III, pl. LXXI.
J. Natanson, Gothic Ivories of the 13th and 14th Centuries (London, 1951), p. 39, fig. 60.
D. A. Porter, Ivory Carvings in Later Medieval England 1200-1400 (unpublished PhD thesis, State University of New York at Binghamton, 1974), no. 49.
Age of Chivalry: Art in Plantagenet England 1200-1400, ed. by J. J. G. Alexander and Paul Binski, exhibition catalogue, London, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 1987, no. 595, fig., pp. 465-466.
W. D. Wixom, 'A Late Thirteenth-Century English Ivory Virgin', in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 50, no. 3 (1987), fig. 14b.
B. Guineau, 'Etude des couleurs dans la polychromie des ivoires médiévaux', in Bulletin de la Société nationale des antiquaires de France (1996), pp. 188-210 (p. 193).
D. Gaborit-Chopin, Ivoires médiévaux, Ve-XVe siècle (Paris: Musée du Louvre, 2003), no. 192.